I didn’t go thru your steps in detail. Perhaps you can do that by checking your understanding with L&L’s documentation:
I did react to your last sentance:
Dropbox syncing is NOT a backup.
And yes, if you have your backups in zip format on the Mac and TimeMachine is backing up that and everything else on your Mac (for disaster recovery) you’ll have one level of backup.
I try to conform to the 3-2-1 backup regime. Read about that on the plethora of articles on web sites.
And don’t forget to do a test restore of, say, the Scrivener backup zip files from TimeMachine to ensure that it’s working and you know how to do it.
No, but it has a way to go back to a previous version.
As far as I can see, I can access to my shared files even if the local copy is not enabled in the Mac (actually, a local copy is in ~/Library/CloudStorage|). Despite appearing to be working fine, would this damage the files?
Dropbox syncs your current working project. If something goes wrong, you accidentally delete text for instance, that deletion will be soon synced and the error will be on the local system and Dropbox.
Provided you have auto backup selected (make it 25 copies) on your local machine, Time Machine will make a backup of those backups.
If Make Available Offline is not selected, it WILL mess your project, sooner than later. Scrivener relies on a local copy of the project.
At that point, can’t you use Dropbox’s Rollback command to recover the older version of the project?
Isn’t a local copy in any case created in the CloudStorage folder, even if you choose the Only Online option for file sync? I wonder if this step is still mandatory, or comes from the older way Dropbox worked on the Mac.
You can try … results from people who’ve actually done this have been mixed, to say the least.
It’s your data, do what you want. But I can tell you that having data stored exclusively in the cloud is, by a wide margin, the most common cause of “lost” work right now.
On further reflection: Since one of the reasons to store data exclusively in the cloud is because local disk space is limited, keeping a stealth local copy would sort of defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?
In any case, online-only projects are known to behave poorly with Scrivener. That’s much more important than how they theoretically “should” work.
The current version of Dropbox on Mac seems to privilege Online Only storage (it is as it is set by default, and how it tries to work even in Offline mode). This seems to be due to Apple’s File Provider that Dropbox uses by default. I’ve no technical competence to confirm this.
The official L&L document explaining in detail how to configure Dropbox (linked above), as well as the Mac User Manual, doesn’t seem to include recommendations about keeping the documents offline. I’m just missing the relevant instructions, or has something changed in the most recent times?
I can sacrifice some space on my drives, but since the only data needing this level of care would be Scrivener, I’d like to see if I can save some space. Dropbox can’t selectively choose Online or Offline depending on the folder (it can just show or hide them locally).
I try to avoid pulling rank here, but you see that shield next to my user ID? It means I’m one of the people who’ll have to try to help you when ignoring this advice mangles your data.
You may have missed this article, about cloud services generally:
Or this one, about Dropbox specifically:
As I said, it’s your data, but I wasn’t exaggerating when I told you this is the most common cause of data loss by a wide margin.
May you be more specific? The only option to selectively sync some folder removes the non-synched folders from the local drive. Is there also an option to continue accessing non-synched folders from the Finder?
Yes, indeed I missed it. I would suggest to add it to the user manual, or at least link to it from there (unless it is already in the manual, and I just wasn’t able to find it).